The Something Brothers
One of the first local bands I heard live in Bloomington-Normal, back during those mythical college days, back in the dim and misty, was the Something Brothers. They were good, probably the best of local rock in the late 80s and early 90s, I suppose. I used to own “You, Me, and the Circus,” but I have no idea what happened to it. On a lark I Googled them and found that they had posted their old songs as mp3s. Get them and relive the olden days!
Lizards From Afar 
December 2, 2008 at 7:35 am
I listened to ‘You, Me & the Circus” during the morning commute today and realized that not only were the SB fun music, but they were really good musically. Outstanding stuff.
April 26, 2009 at 2:11 am
These guys were the Beatles of the 90’s Sparky was Revolver, they never got to do their Sgt. Pepper.
I followed them around to gigs and followed the Spelunkers as well. Crying shame they never made it, though, in much of my correspondance with Tommy, he’s never regretted staying true to his muse.
I wish I could leave my name. I’m in too sensitive of a job to admit on the www to being in this crowd back then. Political correctness sucks.
April 26, 2009 at 8:02 am
Indeed it does. But go download the SB music and enjoy a little nostalgia. And while you’re at it, download our music, too!
December 2, 2008 at 8:15 am
Sweet… I will have to download this to my pod…
December 2, 2008 at 9:37 am
I think I may have actually seen them live a couple of times.
December 2, 2008 at 9:50 am
This is a great catch. Nice to be able to throw some traffic to the old compatriots of the Gallery days (a venue now long gone, unfortunately). I wonder if the old Chernobyl Farmers have ever put anything up? I’d search, but I’m at work, and big brother y’know. Or Semicids? I worked at a couple restaurants with guys from those bands. I’ve got a Semicids tape somewhere…
November 6, 2011 at 7:02 am
No they haven’t, But Fred is a Lawyer now and playing Blue grass in Alabama. Mike is in various bands in Chitown, Mark is fishing in Florida, I never heard from Chris,
December 2, 2008 at 10:03 am
I don’t care about Big Brother (maybe I should). I can’t find the Chernobyl Farmers, but I found this one semicid demo: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0C18K20G
(have not downloaded).
December 2, 2008 at 11:01 am
If you guys are curious about my work, I recently got the typeset proofs of my forthcoming article in Isis, the journal of the history of science society. Fun reading, man!
December 2, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Are you kidding? 26 pages?!?!?!
December 2, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Yeah, 26 pages is a lot for a guy who can’t make it through the funny pages, I know. Anyway, I was thinking I shouldn’t post it publicly yet, so I’m taking down the link for now.
December 2, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I have a strong, but not necessarily accurate, memory of giving my Something Brothers tape to Gator before we graduated. I wonder if that is what happened.
I didn’t remember the Chernobyl Farmers until Chopper mentioned them, and thus far no internet searching brings them up.
December 2, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I don’t recall you giving it to Gator.
December 2, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I know that Gator gave it to me after one particularly booze-soaked evening at the EDB. It was a very tender moment, and I’ll treasure it always.
December 2, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Raise your hand if you can’t resist bringing the level of discourse to an even lower level than previously thought possible.
December 2, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Remember when we did that one song about a giant dick?
December 2, 2008 at 5:22 pm
***I feel that I am being set-up here, but I’ll roll with it***
A song about a giant dick? Was it called The Ballad Of Chopper Newt?
December 2, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Three foot Dick! But, Pent, I heard you are 5’2″ now. Did you grow taller in the intervening years since Gila Monster wrote the song?
December 2, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I’ve been wondering about Cuttlefish, so I visited their RN site and find they’ve released their album. Cool! The whole thing is on RN, but apparently we can buy it on real honest-to-the-godz mass produced CDs.
Perhaps this deserves a post of its own.
December 3, 2008 at 8:20 am
I’m going to buy that Cuttlefish CD when I figure out how. Gordon says it will cost about $3.80. Think I can afford that….
All joking aside, however, I was just thinking that a record label wouldn’t fit our “philosophy” even if we could get one to sign us. We record on our own, engineer on our own, and give away our music. We have to have our own label. We could create our own label and sign up for “digital distribution only” on CD Baby. Would be a $55 start up cost: $35 to sign up the album and $20 for a barcode (which is required for any sort of distribution). Maybe that’s too much to bother, but that would get our music to a broader audience: it would be available on iTunes, Napster, Amazon, etc.
So, what would we name our record label? Three Foot Records? Reptile Recordings?
December 3, 2008 at 9:04 am
Man, I’m the only one blogging today! Well, soon must head off to work (Ha! Holiday Party at the department today. Work consists of drinking.)
But, I added a “blavatar” to our blog, if you look in the URL above. The new system doesn’t seem to work perfectly, however. I didn’t like this one because it squished it, so I tried to replace it with one formatted better for this purpose and it simply won’t show up. Strange.
December 3, 2008 at 9:19 am
I am lurking.
December 3, 2008 at 9:38 am
I am not lurking.
$110 isn’t that much, really. ($37 each.) However, without some kind of advertising/promotion I really doubt that we’ll be able to generate any traffic/interest in buying.
Advertising/promotion costs money.
I guess I’d go along with whatever the team decides, though.
December 3, 2008 at 9:59 am
Lurking. Creepy.
Did I say $110? No, it’s $55 (35+20). So, $13.75 each, if Gator ponies up, too. But, yeah, advertising. Bah Humbug. People might run across us by accident on CD Baby…. Probably there is no point, but I suppose I was inspired by the example of Cuttlefish. I notice they’re no longer offering free downloads of their music on RN…
December 3, 2008 at 10:04 am
I misunderstood your sentence. I thought there were 3 costs with a total of $110.
My point is still the same…we can for the songs to be up for sale somewhere, but if nobody knows about it, nobody will buy them.
December 3, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Cuttlefish sold out! Man, remember when it was about the MUSIC?
Considering that it’s still a precious few who want the songs for free, adding a price tag seems premature.
Although you’ve got to admit, the DL stats on RN are going up, up, up. Several songs have more downloads than listens over the last month, which seems odd, although I suppose that would be the way I would do it if I stumbled across us – if it’s free, it’s for me, to paraphrase the late, great Joey Meyer. Why waste time with streaming it? I can delete it if it sucks.
December 3, 2008 at 1:10 pm
The cool news is that, whenever we were on a podcast, the listen and download numbers would spike. That tells us 2 things:
1) promotion works
2) people heard us and liked what they heard enough to take action
So the question is:
How can we promote ourselves to a much larger audience with no money and very little effort?
P.S.-Cuttlefish DID sell out to the man! (Could they tell us how they did it?)
December 3, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Spam right-wing message boards?
December 3, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I gave up…didn’t seem like it was driving a lot of traffic…
December 3, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Oh, I thought you were doing it because it is your nature. I didn’t realize it was meant to have a purpose.
December 3, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Damn, I’ve had lots of wine. Fucking lots of it. There’s no better way to shoot down a productive day than to have wine at midday.
Anyhoo…
If we get the album on CD Baby and have it distributed to iTunes, etc. that will in fact be a method of promotion. People will find it just by perusing the “punk” selections, for example. I’d be willing to set the price at zero just to get more people to download, except that I think CD Baby wants their money, so they won’t sell it for nothing. I wonder if we can submit to the major distributors, iTunes, Napster, etc., and say “put it up and it’s free!”
We need to set up a Last fm account, too, as well as some others, which will get us distributed to the various digital outlets like the internet radio stations. We don’t need a physical presence at all, really. I think it makes sense, at least for Bloomington Democracy, to give it away to as many people as possible in lo-resolution mp3 format. We could easily set up a site where people could use pay pal to pay for hi resolution audio files, if they were so inclined. If the music became popular enough we could “sell” the next album. Or we could just give it away, too. Unless we have the possibility to getting enough dough to devote ourselves to the music (and it ain’t going to happen, I don’t think), this is always going to be a hobby, so why charge people for it? On the other hand, a little money would help us buy new equipment and thus help pay for the hobby.
December 3, 2008 at 5:13 pm
And I forgot to mention, we need do none of this until we have “final mixes” of the album. Chopper?
December 3, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Good point.
December 3, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Incidentally, I was in Brooklyn Industries today looking for Xmas gifts (and then spent money on myself since they had a big sweater sale), where they were promoting a band called Young Lords. I’m listening to them now on their myspace page: myspace.com/younglords
They’re pretty good! I mean, they’re poseurs, but they’re my kind of poseurs: Rickenbacker-playing scuzzsters who walked into the 21st century right out of the 1970s without ever encountering the 90s at all.
December 3, 2008 at 6:17 pm
One more thing of interest: I googled the Young Lords to see where I could find their music and was taken to http://rcrdlbl.com/
I’d seen this site before, but hadn’t pursued it. At any rate, the site is a network of ad supported online record labels. You have to submit music to them; if they like it they put it up. And what is more, they have a wordpress compatible widget. They only want links to the music. Should I send them a RN playlist? Oh, what the hell, I’ll do it without awaiting your response.
December 3, 2008 at 6:27 pm
No. No! Doooooonnnnnnnnn’t!!!
What the hell…go ahead.
December 3, 2008 at 6:33 pm
I went ahead.
December 3, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I also just tried to post their music widget on my own blog and it didn’t work. Fucking WordPress.com. I’m seriously thinking we should get a new blog.
December 3, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Not to go back to the original point of this post, but yes, you gave me the tape. If Chopper says I gave it to him in a drunken haze, I am ashamed and appalled, but I think I still have it somewhere.
Still, having the mp3s is priceless. I loved Reno and One, Two, Three so much; and If Not Why Not is one of those songs I still desperately wish I’d written.
December 3, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Oh, you gave it to me alright, big guy. And you have nothing to be ashamed of.
December 3, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I’m getting hard….errr, disgusted. I meant disgusted!
December 3, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Sheesh. Go mix some music, man.
I did make the rcrd-lbl widget work, but it doesn’t seem to be sizeable, so it won’t fit into a sidebar. What we need is a floating widget.
I put it in my course blog. Here’s how it looks:
http://cunyhistorytalk.wordpress.com/
December 3, 2008 at 10:41 pm
And it is indeed great to have the SoBros mp3s. Their songs are excellent. Waiting For Godot is one of my favs.
December 4, 2008 at 9:09 am
Stuck in traffic
Reading blog while I wait
December 4, 2008 at 9:59 am
How can you read and drive? No, don’t answer that if you’re still driving…
I listened to If Not Why Not with a little more care during the morning commute, and I think I agree with Gator that it’s probably the best song on that album. It’s like a mini opera, and in fact it changes time signature at least three times, going from 4/4 to 9/8 to 7/8. Cool.
December 4, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I was literally sitting in PARK on the road. There was a malfunction at the RR crossing gates. I was almost 2 hours late for work.
December 4, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Two hours late. I had a job once, in Illinois, in fact, to which I could never make it on time because of intense traffic. The boss started to get quite cross with me, whereupon I quit. Fucking bosses.
If I could only figure out a way to make a living from home, I’d never go to an office or department ever again. But I’m stuck in New York, which wouldn’t be so bad if my wife and daughter were stuck here, too. And in this economy, I can’t even get an interview for a job in Ohio. There are no jobs in Ohio, man.
December 4, 2008 at 5:09 pm
A friend of mine went back to Ohio, only to find her city was gone. In fact, if she is to be believed, the farms of Ohio had been replaced by shopping malls.
December 4, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Which is why I live in Canada.
December 4, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Blame Canada
Blame Canada
With their hockey hullabaloo
And that bitch Anne Murray too
December 4, 2008 at 7:00 pm
We killed Kenny too!
We’re bastards!
December 4, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Naw, most of Ohio is in fact still farmland. Giant agri-corp farmland, I assume, growing genetically modified corn–except where its Amish organic farms. When my airplane breaks through the clouds on the way into Dayton, it’s pretty much farms as far as the eye can see. Except for Dayton, which is a big sprawling pile of post-industrial wasteland–but for the green, hilly southern suburbs where we live.
But they have been digging up fields and putting in shopping malls. They just built one of those ridiculous “town center” malls in some farmland on the edge of town. Godz, I hate consumer capitalism. Let’s go the Gap!
Anybody dig the new dashboard in the blog admin? Confused me, I have to admit.
December 4, 2008 at 10:21 pm
I just logged in a few minutes ago. I’m going to have to figure out the new layout and functionality.
December 5, 2008 at 7:12 am
You guys got the Pretenders reference and you’re just fucking with me, right? I don’t really have anything to say about Ohio. Chrissie Hynde is not technically my friend.
Yeah, new layout is messing me up.
December 5, 2008 at 10:06 am
Oh, yeah, of course I got it. Yeah, man….
December 5, 2008 at 10:31 am
I did not get the references.
I throw myself on the mercy of the godz of music to not revoke my license to continue rocking.
December 5, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Yeah, sure…
“My City Was Gone,” a song by The Pretenders. The song originally appeared in October 1982 as the B-side to the single release of “Back on the Chain Gang”; the two-sided single was the comeback release for the band following the death of founding band member James Honeyman-Scott. The song was included on the album Learning to Crawl released in early 1984 and became a radio favorite in the United States.
Yeah… Who doesn’t know that?
December 5, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Metro doesn’t, apparently.
It’s also, weirdly, the theme music for the Rush Limbaugh show, but I don’t blame Chrissie for that. Mainly because I get the sense that if you blame Chrissie for stuff, she might well beat your ass for you.
Learning To Crawl is essential. Solid awesomeness.
December 5, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I blame her…let her try to kick my ass!
December 5, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Herne just looked that up on wikipedia. No fooling us.
December 5, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Or as old mother Geisert used to say,
“You can’t fool a fool.”
December 6, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Matt’s too quick for me!
December 7, 2008 at 1:30 pm
That’s what the ladies say, Herne.
December 7, 2008 at 5:28 pm
And I thought the nickname “Minuteman” was just a euphemism.
December 7, 2008 at 10:59 pm
No, that’s one hundred percent accurate.